Among the various business and governmental sponsors of this year’s Artomatic is a small but internationally renowned arts group, the Washington Glass School. The Mount Rainier, Md., studio has taken a large chunk of the building’s fifth floor to showcase the elegant creations of co-founders Tim Tate and Erwin Timmers and several other glass virtuosos. Tate, who credits Artomatic with playing a significant role in his career, is showing a sculpture that riffs on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” The provocatively androgynous update positions eight glass figures — male, female and combined — in a circle surrounded by mirrors and lights that simulate a sense of endless replication.
As in previous Artomatics, the highlights include installations that transfigure prosaic white-collar cubicles into places beautiful and strange. David Mordini populates a former office with oversize plastic cicadas that gawk at passersby through big red or orange eyes as insect pitches emerge from a soundtrack by the late Barry Schmetter. Sondra N. Arkin clusters hanging bamboo rods into “showers” that can be entered and produce a tinkling watery sound around the person within them. Standing alone in a black-walled room, Michael Enn Sirvet’s “Negative Space” is an eight-foot-tall aluminum tube designed for low-light sites. The piece is eccentrically perforated so that illumination from an LED inside produces eerie patterns.
What may well be the most amusing remake of an existing space was fashioned by Colin Winterbottom, a large-format photographer who is known for epic views of local sites both well- and little-known. Winterbottom doesn’t usually do installations, but this location must have been irresistible: He’s hung some of his photos in the very office where he worked from 1989 to 1997. At one side of the room, the photographer has placed a desk heaped with work-related papers, including a monthly planner from 1996, as well as a nameplate that identifies him as a research assistant. While showcasing his excellent pictures, Winterbottom also offers a glimmer of hope to all the Artomatic participants who dream of quitting their day jobs.
Artomatic 25 Through April 28 at Artomatic, 2100 M St. NW. artomatic.org.
Guillemin, Harris & Embry
The burbling and chirping soundscapes that accompany Thierry Guillemin’s Studio Gallery show are evocative, but not strictly necessary. The landscapes in the realist painter’s “The Promise of Dawn” convey daybreak exquisitely with scenes of light and haze mingling above water or through trees. When viewing the largest of the French-born local artist’s pictures, which appear almost big enough to enter, the sensation of being immersed in nature is intense.
While Jim Metzner recorded early-morning noises as far away as Australia, most of the pictures the soundtracks complement are of the greater Washington region. A few include signs of human existence, and one foregrounds a boat, rendered with photorealist precision, before a pink sky. But Guillemin usually places the spectator in a seemingly primeval place, whether framed simply or in trickier compositions: “Shenandoah Triptych” is connected by a fallen tree that stretches from the center panel to the next. Such flourishes remind us that we’re seeing the world, however naturalistically represented, through one person’s specific and singular vision.
Juicy rather than misty, Elizabeth McNeil Harris’s pastel drawings of peaches, cherries and limes are simple but voluptuous. The Maryland artist’s “The Colors of Fruit,” also at Studio, portrays the plump orbs as multihued and gleaming with highlights. In pictures that are often keyed to selected verse, the fruits cast colored shadows or radiate soft glows. Harris’s pictures represent the fleshiness of their subjects, while also giving them a metaphysical shine.
Adjacent to Harris’s drawings is “Woman/Artist,” a small selection of artworks by four current and former gallery staffers. The standout is Lydia Embry’s “Molded and Morphed,” a sculptural painting that incorporates shells and shards of broken crockery. The found objects fit into swells of built-up paint to evoke a sense of a world in flux, and to illustrate the essential link between destruction and creation.
Thierry Guillemin: The Promise of Dawn; Elizabeth McNeil Harris: The Colors of Fruit and Woman/Artist: A Studio Gallery Staff Show Through April 20 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.
She’s not an architect, but Adrienne Moumin is a builder. The artist makes black-and-white film photographs, prints them in multiples, cuts the pictures into fragments and arranges the pieces into collages so precise they could pass for computer-generated. Moumin divides her time between suburban Maryland and New York City, whose buildings are the principal source for her “Architextures” series. Some of these assemblages have found an appropriate home at the District Architecture Center, which is exhibiting Moumin’s “In Another Life.”
A few of the pictures were seen in the artist’s 2020 Portico Gallery show, which also included her treatment of the Flatiron Building, constructed from 32 prints fanned into a sort of infinity loop. But this venue can accommodate larger pieces, which more effectively conjure the heft and presence of Moumin’s architectural inspirations.
Not all the collages are based on New York edifices, or buildings at all. Featured are a piece that spins details of the Smithsonian Castle into a pinwheel, and others forged from repeated images of flowers or paper lanterns. Yet even these pictures have an architectonic feel. Moumin’s interlocked artworks are sturdy, precise and graceful as a landmark structure.
Adrienne Moumin: In Another Life Through April 19 at District Architecture Center, 421 Seventh St. NW. aiadc.com. 202-347-9403.
